&nbspCourse Descriptions(as of updated: 9 August 2002)
The following course descriptions have been written by individual instructors
to provide more detailed information on specific section sthan that found
in the General Catalog. When individual descriptions are not available,
the General Catalog descriptions [in brackets] are used. (Although we try
to have as accurate and complete information as possible, this schedule
remains subject to change.)

304 U (History of Literary Criticism & Theory II)TTh 4:30-6:20 pmShaviro
This class is an introduction to recent (post-structuralist) literary theory.
We start with a look at some important precursors (Nietzsche, Freud, Saussure)
against the background of the traditional assumptions of modern Western philosophy
(Descartes). We then take a look at some of the major poststructuralist
theorists of the 1960s and 1970s (Barthes, Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze
and Guattari, Irigarey, and Baudrillard) and end with a consideration of the
legacy that these thinkers have left us today. Books ordered with be
supplemented by a course packet of additional readingsfrom Saussure,
Derrida, Lacan, Irigaray, Deleuze & Guattari, and Baudrillard. Texts: René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (tr.
Cress); Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (tr. Large); Sigmund
Freud, Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (tr. Strachey); Roland Barthes,
The Pleasure of the Text (tr. Miller); Michel Foucault, The Foucault
Reader.

311 A (Modern Jewish Literature in Translation)TTh 10:30-12:20Alexander
This course deals with the literary interpretation of modern Jewish experience,
which includes the break-up of a cohesive religious culture, mass migrations
of unprecedented magnitude, the destruction of European Jewry by National
Socialism during World War II, and the effort to reestablish a national existence
in the Jewish homeland of Israel. Readings include such classic Yiddish authors
as Sholom Aleichem and I. L. Peretz, and more recent Yiddish writers, among
them I. B. Singer and Jacob Glatstein. At least two writers who did not write
in Jewish languages, the Czech Franz Kafka and the Italian Primo Levi, will
also be studied. Among the Israeli authors in the syllabus are Agnon, Hazaz,
and Appelfeld. Considerable attention will also be given to the play of competing
ideas that form the background of the imaginative literature. Texts:
Howe & Greenberg, eds., Treasury of Yiddish Stories; Appelfeld,
Badenheim 1939; Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, Heller, ed., The
Basic Kafka.

313 A (Modern European Literature in Translation)TTh 1:30-3:20Popov
This class is devoted to continental European writers and celebrated works
of literature, music and philosophy which defined modernity between 1850 and
1914 (Flaubert, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Wagner, Ibsen, Nietzsche, and
others). There will be nine short assignments (one on each writer)
and a final. Texts: Baudelaire, Baudelaire in English;
Flaubert, Bouvard and Pécuchet; Gide, The Immoralist;
Huysmans, Against Nature; Ibsen, Four Major Plays; Nietzsche,
The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner; Zola, Thérèse
Raquin.

315 A (Literary Modernism)MW 10:30-12:20Blau
If modernism was not exactly a movement, but a confluence of movements (including
those of the avant-garde), it was with whatever reactionary contradictions—a
form of radical energy, out of conflict, upheaval, and the most devastating
social critique. Or, as Karl Marx put it, breaking the ground for modern
thought: “I am speaking of a ruthless criticism of everything existing....”
As some of what was existing has receded into the past, one of the ironies
of our time is that modernism itself has become subject to critique, which
“with more or less ruthlessness” sees it as inseparable from formalism, elitism,
patriarchy, and other forms of regression, politically incorrect. There
are also recurring pronouncements about the end of modernism or its imminent
death, though in the era of the postmodern that seems like wish-fulfillment,
for it somehow always returns, or some engaging aspect of it—all the more
now as the postmodern seems (with an ironic post-post) to be coming to an
end.

In any case, the duration of modernism has been such that, like the Enlightenment
or Romanticism, it may be thought of as a historical period whose exact parameters
(or dates) may be debatable, but whose outlines are there like a magnetic
field. It is a field, however, frustrating to any compass, which would
spin in all directions without anything like true north, through contradiction,
paradox, fracture, and a crisis of continuity. These symptoms of the
modern are in a sense its definition, which is always subject to change.
As for the contestations in modernism, it may have grown out of the “ethos
of suspicion” developed by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, whom we shall be reading
in this course, along with certain major literary figures, from Baudelaire
to Yeats or Rilke, who didn’t have to go out and look for trouble.
That was already on the scene when unlimited progress seemed assured through
the end of the nineteenth century until the first World War, which as a moral
and cultural disaster situated T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land or Kafka’s
Penal Colony or brought an edge of madness to the prose of Virginia
Wolfe.

While we shall be considering the origins of modernism, we shall also be
dealing with the mandate to be modern by making it new, which for Arthur
Rimbaud or Ezra Pound was an aesthetic and moral necessity. The specific
literary texts have not yet been selected, but those we’ll be studying will
have been instrumental in adding a new dimension to newness, a dimension
of shock, fracture, decreation, “the destructive element” in which Joseph
Conrad insisted we must – in order to be creative at all – be immersed.
In trying to understand it, we shall have to immerse ourselves in what, canonical
now, can still destabilize thought.

320 A (English Literature: The Middle Ages)MW 12:30-2:20Taylor
The first half of this course will focus on the literature of Anglo-Saxon
England, the second on the golden age of Middle English, the fourteenth
century. Students should expect to attend all meetings and to engage
in discussion. Frequent short papers, two main papers, midterm and
final. Majors only, Registration Period 1. Texts:Byock,
tr., Volsunga Saga; Hamer, ed., A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse;
Heaney, tr., Beowulf; Chaucer, Canterbury Tales.

321 A (Chaucer).TTh 1:30-3:20Vaughan
Our reading of Chaucer will begin with his translation of Boethius’s Consolation
of Philosophy, and focus on Troilus and Criseyde and selections from The Canterbury
Tales. The aims of the course will be, among other things, to develop
our competence in the reading and understanding of Chaucer’s Middle English.
In order to go beyond the linguistic to the literary and cultural, we will
compare some of the sources he drew from (and altered) for his narratives;
we’ll consider a variety of critical approaches to his poetry; and we’ll examine
aspects of medieval culture which contribute to a full appreciation of his
complex art. My preference is for discussion, but in the absence of
it (or in attempts to stimulate it) I will resort to (more or less informal)
lecturing. Requirements for the course will include – in addition to
attendance and participation in class discussions – weekly response papers,
a few longer (3-5 pp.) critical papers, some translation exercises and quizzes,
and a final exam. Majors only, Registration Period 1. Texts:
Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales: Nine Tales and a General Prologue (ed.
Kolve & Olson); Troilus and Criseyde (ed. Shoaf); Bisson, Chaucer
and the Late Medieval World.

322 TS (English Literature: The Age of Queen Elizabeth I)MW 4:30-6:20 pmWebster
A tour of love, sex, and death in the sixteenth century--lots of Spenser’s
knights and dragons, lots of plays by Shakespeare’s friends, and love poetry
to conjure by. (Evening Degree students only, Registration Periods 1
& 2.) Texts:More, Utopia; Spenser,
The Faerie Queene; Shakespeare, Sonnets; Fraser & Rabkin,
Drama of the English Renaissance, Vol. 2; Rice & Grafton,
Foundations of Early Modern Europe.

325 A (English Literature: The Late Renaissance)
TTh 9:30-11:20
A. Fisher
[A period of skepticism for some, fiath for others, but intellectual upheaval
generally. Poems by John Donne and the "metaphysical" school; poems
and plays by Ben Jonson and other late rivals to Shakespeare; prose by Sir
Francis Bacon and other writers.] Majors only, Registration Period 1.

329 A (Rise of the English Novel)
MW 11:30-1:20 --cancelled 5/21--

331 A (Romantic Poetry I)MW 9:30-11:20Modiano
The course will offer a broad overview of the literary and intellectual
history of the Romantic period, focusing on the works of William Blake, Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, Dorothy Wordsworth and William Wordsworth. We will
begin with an investigation of the impact of the French Revolution on the
Romantics and of radical developments in religion (the opposition to Christianity),
philosophy (the revolt against empiricism and the emergence of transcendental
philosophy), aesthetics (the popularity of the aesthetics of the picturesque,
the beautiful and the sublime, science (the attack on Newtonic science), and
art (the prevalence of landscape painting). After two weeks on the
general topics specified above, we will study Blake’s poetry and illustrations
and move on to the literary collaboration between Coleridge and Wordsworth
and their unusual dependence on each other, personal as well as literary,
beneficial as well as disabling. Majors only, Registration Period
1. Texts: Blake, Blake’s Poetry and Designs; Songs
of Innocence and Experience; America: A Prophecy & Europe: A Prophecy;
Coleridge, Selected Poems; Wordsworth, Selected Poetry; Butler,
ed., Burke, Paine, Godwin and the Revolution Controversy; photocopied
course packet.

333 A (English Novel: Early & Middle 19th-C.)
MW 9:30-11:20
Tandy
[Studies in the novel in one of its classic phases. Authors include Austen,
the Brontes, Dickens, Thackeray.] Majors only, Registration Period 1.

334 A (English Novel: Later 19th-C.)MW 12:30-2:20Taranath
This course investigates novels and short stories written in late 19th-
and early 20th-century Britain, as well as social history that contextualizes
this time period and its ideological concerns. In reading these texts,
we will pay close attention to the ways that imperialism and colonial relations
structured social and political relations between countries, peoples, races,
and politics. Students who enroll in this course must be willing
to fundamentally engage with issues of race, sexuality, colonialism, world
politics, analyses of power, gender, and class relations. Majors
only, Registration Period 1.Texts: Cowasjee, ed., Oxford
Anthology of Raj Stories; Kipling, Kim; Davis, Late Victorian
Holocausts.

335 TS (English Literature: The Age of Victoria)MW 7-8:50 pmTandy
From romantic love to spiritual angst, from goblins and governesses to factory
workers and leisured gentlemen, the Victorian period has truly got a bit of
everything. Few eras of British history have encompassed such sweeping
changes on all levels of society as the Victorian Era, and this quarter we’ll
be exploring those changes and both the excitement and anxiety they caused
through the poetry and drama of the time, as well as the novels Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë and Hard Times by Charles Dickens. Evening
Degree students only, Registration Periods 1 & 2. Texts:
Brontë, Jane Eyre; Dickens, Hard Times; Abrams, et al.,.
eds., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2B (The Victorian
Age), 7th ed.

336 A (English Literature: The Early Modern Period)MW 11:30-1:20BursteinThe Modernist Body. This class at once introduces the student
to British modernism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
and engages the complexities of the period. While we build a context
for understanding the emergence of literary works at this time, we will focus
on two skills: that of “close reading” (techniques for analyzing a literary
text on its own terms) and of comparative thematic analysis (bringing texts
together in order to make a convincing argument based on proof provided by
disparate materials. The student, therefore, will at once become familiar
with the historical time period and intimate with the means by which not only
arguments are constructed, but what it means to immerse one’s self in a novel,
poem, or avant-garde manifesto. Our specific way into this will be
to focus on the trope of embodiment: what constitutes a body, a “self,” or
a psyche for these various authors. Can you have a body without having
a mind (or vice versa) and if so, which is preferable? Do the characters
bleed, or do they crackle with electricity? What is at stake in such
distinctions? In addition to paying attention to individual bodies,
we will focus on depictions of groups of bodies, especially the themes of
crowds and violence. We will read both fiction, emphasizing narrative
technique, and poetry, with an ear toward the peculiarities of syntax.
By the end of this class, you will know what syntax means, and perhaps even
have one of your own. The emphasis will be on historical interpretation,
grounded in formal analysis. Active participation is mandatory: subsequent
to introductory lectures, we will use discussion as a means of exploring the
material. Therefore as we explore the stakes of embodiment, your own
body (and hopefully your mind) must be in the classroom. Readings will
include Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Ezra
Pound, Virginia Woolf, and lesser known writers like the cruel and funny novelist
Wyndham Lewis, and the eminently peculiar and wonderful poet Mina Loy.
Majors only, Registration Period 1. Texts: Joseph Conrad,
Heart of Darkness; James Joyce, Dubliners; Ezra Pound, Selected
Poems; Wyndham Lewis, Tarr: The 1918 Version; Virginia Woolf,
Jacob’s Room; Mina Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedeker; D. H. Lawrence,
Women in Love; Katherine Mansfield, Stories; Ford Madox Ford,
The Good Soldier.

337 A (The Modern Novel)TTh 12:30-2:20RainePortraits of the Artist in Modern Fiction. The typical image
of the modern artist is that of an isolated hero, alienated from his community,
but able to redeem the chaos of modern life by inventing new literary forms
that express his (or her) unique creative vision. In this course, we’ll
read a variety of British and American novels from the early twentieth century,
and explore how their representations of artist figures compare with that
definition. In the process, we will familiarize ourselves with some
of the defining formal characteristics and thematic concerns of modern fiction.
Questions we’ll consider include: What makes a novel “modern”? Does
a modern artist have to be alienated, and if so, why? How do geographical
location and the social relations of gender, race, and class shape the relationships
between artists and their communities? How and why do modern writers
use experimental forms to communicate their understanding of the world?
Note: These are challenging texts, and reading them will require time and
effort on your part. Students are expected to attend class regularly,
to participate actively in discussions, and to approach the texts with lively
curiosity and an open mind. Expect lots of discussion and a substantial
amount of writing. Majors only, Registration Period 1. Texts:James
Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Virginia Woolf, To
the Lighthouse; Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio; Willa Cather,
O Pioneers! ; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Ralph
Ellison, Invisible Man.

342 A (Contemporary Novel).TTh 12:30-2:20Lundgren
This course explores the contemporary novel through two main frameworks:
postcolonialism and postmodernism. While postcoloniaism alludes to
a politico-historical context and/or content, postmodernism evokes a set
of formal features and a relationship to an artistic or intellectual tradition.
We will ask to what extent these paradigms mutually inform each other or,
conversely, to what extent they are mutually incompatible. Some questions
to be pursued include: what drives each novel? How does it affect our
reading experience when a novel is driven by a political project? By
an aesthetic project? What characterizes a postcolonial subject, and
what modes of narration are used to represent (or to decolonize) him or her?
What distinguishes a postmodern text, and how does postmodernism challenge
our concepts of subjectivity, representation, knowledge and history?
Do postcolonial texts more often avoid, or employ, postmodern strategies?
To what effect? Do postmodern texts typically construct subjectivities
that are privileged, or marginalized, according to axes of domination that
include nation, race, class, gender, and sexuality? Why? What
use do contemporary texts make of myth or of sub-genres such as the detective
novel, the Western, or the romance? The reading list includes a range
of novels from North America, Africa and England and a course packet of
theoretical essays and literary criticism. Majors only, Registration
Period 1. Texts: Dangaremba, Nervous Conditions;
Ondaatje, Coming Through Slaughter; Gunnars, The Prowler;
Silko, Ceremony; Bowering, Burning Water; King, Green Grass,
Running Water; Winterson, The Passion.

345 A (Studies in Film)M 1:30-4:20/W 1:30-3:20Gillis-BridgesWomen Filmmakers. An overview of the films of women film directors
from the early 1900s to the present, with particular attention to the work
of U.S. filmmakers. The featured directors represent mainstream Hollywood
as well as independent filmmaking traditions. They include lesbian and
heterosexual women, white women and women of color. Our goal is to
examine women’s films from formal, critical, and historical perspectives.
Text: photocopied course packet.

350 TS (Traditions in American Fiction)MW 7-8:50 pmAbrams
A sampling of significant American fiction, with attention to extreme and
dramatic differences in literary voice, and featuring as comprehensive a look
as possible at the ranges of theme and technique that have engaged American
authors over the years. Students should come prepared to read texts
closely and to deliberate on the reciprocity between fiction and the socio-political
context it both derives from and helps to form. Evening Degree students
only, Registration Periods 1 & 2. Texts: Nathaniel Hawthorne,
The Portable Hawthorne; Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron
Mills and Other Stories; Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn;
Stephen Crane, The Portable Crane; Kate Chopin, The Awakening and
Selected Stories; Henry James, The Portable Henry James.

353 A (American Literature: Later 19th-C.)Dy 8:30Griffith
We’ll read and discuss an assortment of novels, short stories and sketches
written by American authors in the decades following the Civil War.
Students will be expected to attend class regularly, keep up with reading
assignments, and take part in open discussions. Written work will
consist entirely of a series of brief in-class essays done in response to
study questions handed out in advance. Majors only, Registration
Period 1.Texts: Judith Fetterly, ed., American Women
Regionalists 1850-1910; William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham;
Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Selected Short Stories; Stephen Crane,
Great Short Works; Henry James, The Turn of the Screw and Other
Short Fiction; Charles Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition; Edith
Wharton, The House of Mirth; Mark Twain, Roughing It.

354 A (American Literature: The Early Modern Period)Dy 10:30Griffith
We’ll read and discuss an assortment of novels and short stories by American
authors writing in the first half of the twentieth century. Students
will be expected to attend class regularly, keep up with reading assignments,
and take part in open discussions. Written work will consist of a number
of brief in-class essays, done in response to study questions handed out in
advance. Majors only, Registration Period 1.Texts:
William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses; Zora Neale Hurston, Their
Eyes Were Watching God; Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls;
Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio; Eudora Welty, Thirteen Stories;
John Steinbeck, The Long Valley; Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt; Richard
Wright, Uncle Tom’s Children.

355A (American Literature: Contemporary America)TTh 8:30-10:20HarkinsDomestic Haunting: Memory and History in Postmodern U.S. Fiction.
In 1989 when Francis Fukuyama declared the “end of history,” he meant to
suggest that the end of the Cold War marked the end of the twentieth century’s
grand narratives of world-historical conflict between liberalism, fascism,
and communism. A similar end of history has also been pronounced over
the American literary canon of this period. In place of a unifying
canon based in the grand narratives of shared national experience, many critics
claim we have turned to a more pluralist canon based in diverse, localized
narratives of time and place. In this class, we look at several writers from
the post WWII era to examine how such an alleged loss of grand historical
narratives has shaped what counts as American literature. In particular,
we will look at the ways authors have used the twin concepts of “history”
and “memory” to contest this account of the changing social, political, and
economic relations of American identity. What do stories about characters
haunted by a past that will not leave them alone tell us about contemporary
problems in U.S. citizenship? Our readings for this class will explore
the relationship between memory and history, loss and desire, and home and
nation in the works of authors struggling to come to terms with transformations
in the “time” of post-modern U.S. Society. Majors only, Registration
Period 1. Texts: N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn;
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49; Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy;
Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents; Toni Morrison,
Beloved; Fae Myenne Ng, Bone; Sandra Cisneros, The Hosue
on Mango Street; Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure;
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee.

359 A (Contemporary American Indian Literature)
M-Th 12:30
Colonnese
[Creative writings -- novels, short stories, poems -- of contemporary Indian
authors; traditions out of which they evolved. Differences between Indian
writers and writers of the dominant European/American mainstream.] Majors
only, Registration Period 1 (Offered jointly with AIS 377A.)

367 A (Women and the Literary Imagination).TTh 10:30-12:20KaupFeminist Domesticity: Women’s Revisions and Myths of the Home.
So, talking about feminism, what’s home got to do with it? A whole
lot. Domestic interiors have shaped women’s identities—as Virginia
Woolf wrote, “Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that
by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force.”
The domestic sphere is also the cradle of feminism, for by making the home
an issue of public debate (and by claiming the authority to speak in public
about the home), women, raised as homemakers, have turned a private matter
into a matter of public concern. In the process, women intellectuals
themselves have emerged from the shadows of the household into the light
of the public sphere. Moving by key texts in 19th and 20th-century
women’s fiction and scholarship, we will study the diverse ways in which
women writers have reconceptualized the social (and sometimes also the material)
structures of the home. The course uses a multicultural approach to
establish a dialogue between Anglo American, Mexican American, and African
American feminisms and texts. Texts: Stepford Wives (film);
Jovita González, Caballero; Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s
Own; Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street; Harriet Jacobs,
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Toni Morrison, Beloved;
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale; photocopied course packet with
readings by Catharine Beecher, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Betty Friedan, bell
hooks, and others.

368 A (Women Writers)MW 11:30-1:20MoodyWomen/Writing/Bondage. This course focuses on 19th- and 20th- century
US women's representations of diverse forms of bondage, ranging from the chains
of chattel slavery to the "ties" of marriage to the strictures of material
poverty. Texts: Harriet Jacobs (Jean F. Yellin, ed.), Incidents
in the Life of a Slave Girl; Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Other
Stories; Sui Sin Far (Edith Eaton), Mrs. Spring Fragrance; Edith
Wharton, The House of Mirth; Gayl Jones, Corregidora; Susan
Glaspell, Plays; Anita Diamant, The Red Tent; Ann Sexton, To
Bedlam and Partway Back.

370 A (English Language Study)TTh 10:30-12:20Wennerstrom
[Wide-range introduction to the study of written and spoken English.
The nature of language; ways of describing language; the use of language
study as an approach to English literature and the teaching of English,]
Majors only, Registration Period 1.Texts:Language
Files (Ohio State University) (latest ed.). Clark & Eschholz, Language:
Introductory Readings.

381 A (Advanced Expository Writing)MW 8:30-9:50C. Fischer
In this class we will use the personal essay as a means to improve our writing.
In addition to reading some of the best practitioners of this wonderful genre,
we explore how imitation and parody can help us in matters of style, tone,
and sentence structure. The course requirements will include writing
a book or arts review, a personal essay, a memoir, as well as a number of
smaller practice assignments. Majors only, Registration Period 1.Text: photocopied course packet.

381 B (Advanced Expository Writing).TTh 10:30-11:50Mandaville
Everyone can write better. This course will provide a workshop for
your academic writing, specifically for the academic essay. Published
essays in a variety of fields will be considered to help expand your writing
tools. Assignments will include rhetorical imitations and translations
of the idea of essay from one form to another (as painting to text).
Be prepared to essay everyday and share your writing with peers for feedback.
Majors only, Registration Period 1. Optional text: Andrea
A. Lunsford, The Everyday Writer (w. 2001 APA Update.

381 C (Advanced Expository Writing)TTh 1:30-2:50Browning
[Concentration on the development of prose style for experienced witers.]
Majors only, Registration Period 1. No texts.

383 A (Intermediate Verse Writing)MW 10:30-11:50Wagoner
[Intensive study of the ways and means of making a poem. Further development
of fundamental skills. Emphasis on revision. Prerequisite: ENGL 283.]
No texts.

383 B (Intermediate Verse Writing)
TTh 11:30-12:50
Bierds
[Intensive study of the ways and means of making a poem. Further development
of fundamental skills. Emphasis on revision. Prerequisite: ENGL 283.]

384 A (Intermediate Short Story Writing)
MW 10:30-11:50
Nestor
[Exploring and developing continuity in the elements of fiction writing.
Methods of extending and sustaining plot, setting, character, point of view,
and tone. Prerequisite: ENGL 284.] Text: Norton Anthology of Short
Fiction.

384 B (Intermediate Short Story Writing)
TTh 1:30-2:50
Nestor
[Exploring and developing continuity in the elements of fiction writing.
Methods of extending and sustaining plot, setting, character, point of view,
and tone. Prerequisite: ENGL 284.] Text: Norton Anthology of Short
Fiction.